ZF JOINS DEVELOPMENT OF INNOVATIVE PEOPLE AND CARGO MOVER

Autonomous electromobility will make traffic in metropolitan areas cleaner, safer and more efficient. To promote the establishment of these systems and to inspire new technological innovations, ZF has envisaged a joint venture with the company e.GO Mobile AG through its subsidiary Zukunft Ventures. Target of the new joint venture e.GO Moove, headquartered in Aachen, is to develop, produce and sell autonomous people and cargo movers. The first prototype was recently presented on the campus of RWTH Aachen University

ZF is a leading automotive supplier of electrified drivelines, which are an important building block in ZF's commitment to this envisaged joint venture company e.GO Moove, because they are characterized by durability, economy and a high level of efficiency. In addition, ZF will also make its ADAS, chassis and sensor fusion technologies available to this planned joint venture. The scalable supercomputing control box ZF ProAI will play a central role as an integrated vehicle system that can be updated in the cloud. The control box is based on artificial intelligence algorithms for vehicle-to-infrastructure applications and is capable of learning. It can communicate with other vehicles and its surrounding environment, and, in the form of swarm intelligence, make vehicle fleets safer and more efficient. ZF, e.Go Mobile AG and Nvidia are working together to develop and test autonomous driving functions for the e.GO Mover.

ZF sees a great deal of future potential worldwide for electric and autonomous vehicles to be used to transport both people and cargo. The ZF Future Study, published in November 2016, has already predicted enormous growth, mainly in the city center logistics industry by 2030.

ZF is therefore continuing to establish cooperative agreements with external partners and other experts in the field, which is why it founded Zukunft Ventures GmbH in September 2016. Headquartered in Friedrichshafen, this new company has a clear mission, namely to invest in companies that are actively developing technologies twhich are relevant for ZF. And from ZF, these smaller, but already well-established companies receive support from a strong partner. In return, ZF is expanding its portfolio to include sustainable technologies that should keep it one step ahead of the competition.